Wednesday, June 25, 2014

This is a different twist on a tee shirt quilt. I did most of the assembly and stitching of the entire quilt as well at the quilting on the longarm. I will do my best to explain. And I apologize in advance that I have very few photos. Not sure what happened, because I know I took more, I know I saw that I took more, and yet they are not to be found. Oh well, back to the quilt.

Here it is in all its sideways splendor. Couldn't fix that either. But, what I want to show you, and I hope you can see is that the gold background is all one piece of fabric.
I cut the logos out of the shirts, and put a narrow border of fabric around each. Then I spread the gold fabric out and arranged the shirt blocks over the surface. I marked corners for each and made note of which block went where. Then I loaded the gold fabric on the longarm and started construction. I stitched each block onto the backing, SID around the border of the blocks, and then used ribbon to cover the raw edge. I used a squiggly line to stitch the ribbon down.

The school mascot is the Railroaders, so a train theme was totally "on board" haha. A large quilt was requested, but that left a lot of empty space that I filled in with rail road track. This too I did on the longarm. I had the path marked, and lay narrow ribbon down for the outer rails, stitched that down, and then came back and stitched the ties between the rails down, It was fun and relatively easy to use the longarm for the construction process.

I must say though that the part I enjoyed the most was the filler background. Oh the joy of crossing lines. It was so freeing, fun and I love the way it turned out.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Hello, hello, hello. I finally finished another Star quilt, making stars from a Jelly Roll. These stars are fun to make, and this quilt fit into my resolutions this year. I used fabric that I already had, woo hoo, and made a quilt for my grand daughter Micah. Even the back was fabric that I had on hand.

Having made this quilt before, I knew I wanted to quilt it completely differently, and I did. I also used ideas and techniques that I learned at my classes at HMQS.

Here is the finished quilt. and now for lots of photos,

The borders, love this technique, and I was influenced by Linda at thequiltedpineapple. For the piano keys, one thing I do that may be helpful is I do my backtracking on the straight lines. In other words, I use my straight edge ruler, stitch a line into the arc, and the I restitch over that line to the outer edge, travel through the edge of the quilt to my next straight line. I like this method, and find it faster for me rather than having to travel stitch over the design of other quilting. That's just my way.

I always love the before shots.

Each star was quilted the same way, but the negative space between the stars were all similar, but varied.

Seeing the yellow head pin reminds me that I haven't yet quilted this area.

This shot shows the entire square created by the quilting. I made the large squares appear to go under the sashing.

For the smaller squares I made the squares float on the sashing. I like the effect these two have with each other.

And the cute chicken backing, because Micah does love chickens, and this fabric was just too cute.

I learned much making this quilt, I did more marking than I usually do, but having a design continue under the sashing was trickier than I thought sometimes. It is good to have this one finished, and I mean finished, Notice that the binding is on and stitched.

Thanks for your patience with my post delays, I have every intention of blogging better, and I do appreciate your support and company.

About Me

I am Esther, and I have loved sewing as long as I can remember. Many years ago, I started an embroidery business so I could work from home and raise my children. I now own a longarm quilting machine to redirect my home based business to match my current obsession. Sewing has always been part of my life, and try as I might not to, I always have threads on the floor.